Grounded
by Stef
Summary: ONESHOT. Elle visits Sylar on Christmas. "I'm not scared for my life. I'm scared for his."


A voice that's been haunting his dreams for a while now greets him as he enters his house. "Merry Christmas?"

He wants to be surprised when he sees Elle sitting at the rickety kitchen table. He doesn't bother asking her right away how she got here or why (she's _alive_). Sylar only shuts and locks the front door, sets his shopping bags down, and moves to turn on the lights.

"Don't." Is the first thing that comes out of her mouth. She's backlit, the sunset behind her obscuring her face from him. He'd know her anywhere. She doesn't get to hide, not from him. As the lights come on, Elle shields the side of her face with one hand. She doesn't come out and call him an asshole, but he knows she's probably thinking it. Telepathy isn't a power he's acquired to distract himself with yet.

"I trust you've made yourself at home." He says by way of greeting.

Elle, still blocking the light, shrugs. "I haven't redecorated or anything, if that's what you mean."

Sylar puts the groceries away with telekinesis. He feels a little silly, trying to have a conversation with a suspiciously alive Elle while cans of beans and gallons of milk float past, but he needs to be an efficient multitasker around her. "What do you want Elle?"

She shifts in the chair a little. The cold wood hurts her back. "I have something for you. Think of it as a Christmas present."

"And what could it possibly be?" Curiosity gets the Serial Killer.

Elle smirks. "Don't worry about that for now." She has control of the situation- or at least she thinks she does. To make sure she's got Sylar distracted, she crosses her legs in the too-short skirt she has on. There are no bullet-hole shaped scars on her thighs.

"Who sent you?" Sylar asks. This couldn't possibly be Elle. Could it? He hoped his lie detecting ability would reveal the best and worst liar he knew.

"I sent myself," she says simply. "I don't work for anyone involved with abilities or the government anymore."

"So where are you working? A diner?" Sylar teases. The last bottle of wine lands carefully on the table Elle's seated at. Two glasses follow.

Elle rolls her eyes. "My family is filthy rich. I'm a trust fund baby. You really think I'm gonna go out and wait tables or work at the mall? _Please!_ I have way more pride than that and you know it."

He knows it. He was there when she died. Or pretended to die. Another lie he believed. "If you're not working for anyone, then why are you here? So I can kill you again?" He opens the wine and pours two glasses. He shoves one at Elle.

"I already told you." Elle says, shoving the glass back.

"You also told me Arthur Petrelli was my father." He wants to argue, to test her.

"I never told you that. The words never left my mouth." Elle not-quite yells.

"You certainly implied it."

"I never did that, either." Elle says with a scowl. "I just never denied it."

"With holding the truth is just as bad as lying." He tells her.

Elle only looks at him from across the table. She considers what he's just said. "Fine. I'll tell you."

Sylar, ready to argue some more, has the nerve to look puzzled when Elle looks him in the eye. She seems almost sad about what she's going to tell him.

"I'm pregnant. And it's definitely yours."

Sylar waits for the tell-tale tingle to itch in his ears. It never arrives. This is Elle. And Elle is pregnant. And it's definitely his baby. And to think he'd been waiting for a new challenge to come along. "You're pregnant, so you decide to come to the house of the man that killed you?" He can't make sense of Elle's actions.

"Well, I wanted you to know and I knew this was a dumb idea, but I'm so scared and I just needed to be somewhere safe where I knew no one would try to hurt him." Elle rambles.

"So fearing for your life brought you to _me_?" He wants to laugh at the situation.

"I'm not scared for my life." Elle says quietly. "I'm scared for _his_." She looks down at her stomach, dreads it growing larger. "If you want me dead, that's fine. I could only ruin his life anyway. But please," she places a tiny hand on her flat-for-now abdomen. "Wait until he's here to do it."

Sylar obliges her. He waits until a year to the day later to kill her a second time. Father and son cross the beach to the car, mother still in the sand. Sylar never notices the infant wave a hand at his dead mother. When he gets to the car, he turns back to admire his handiwork at a job finally finished. Elle's body is gone- footprints and writing in the sand the only evidence she was even there.

Sylar frowns at the message Elle scrawled into the beach: _'Yes Gabriel, he has a power. Merry Christmas, XOXO Elle'_ He kicks the words in the sand and eyes his son. "Do that again and you're grounded."

_I wrote this for the sylelle_chall community on livejournal. The prompt was 'But don't you see? Fear has brought us together. That's the magic of Xmas.' -Fry from Futurama So there's my little Xmas fic for you all, lol. Sorry it's so dark, but I wrote a really cracky one last year. Gotta balance things out. Anyway, I thought I'd put a different take on the Gray Family here and sorta explore, if Noah was Elle's son, why she wasn't in the picture (in that scene). Hope you all liked it :)_


End file.
